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April 8, 2003

950,000 Hotel Rooms

LodgeNet to offer broadband: It doesn't say wireless, but it is broadband. LodgeNet offers hotels in-room "interactive services," which I believe includes movies on demand and gaming. They're in 5,700 properties representing 950,000 rooms. In the hotels I've stayed at, there's a box in each room, which means adding an Ethernet port and a Wi-Fi hub would be trivial (if overkill on the Wi-Fi side). [via Nigel Ballard]

2 Comments

Actually, Lodgenet has offered this for a while: I paid through the nose for wired ethernet access at a W hotel New Orleans two months ago, and I'm pretty sure it was Lodgenet.

Pretty crappy authentication service: Each time I logged in, it asked if I want to buy 24 hours of service - even though I had already bought it earlier that day. Only one charge per day came through on the bill, but it was still unnerving to imagine being charged $8 3 times that day.

Hi,
In regards to your post about these hotels, I've always wondered, how do they offer customers a rental usb or pcmia card that installs easily (drivers and whatnot) so that the common lay person could get it up and working? Is there a particular brand or standard that all these hotels are going to in order to ensure easy hardware installation?

I remember my first two wifi cards where a pain to install, and I had to install updatded xp drivers to get it to work correctly. Oh and then there is the wifi settings themselves including encryption codes that need to be entered.